Capricorn One
(1978)
[DVD Info]
A group of men, John Walker (O.J Simpson), Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), and Peter Willis (Sam Waterson) are preparing for their flight to Mars. Right before the shuttle is about to take off a man demands they come with him. The astronauts are taken to an abandoned military base in the middle of nowhere and the shuttle takes off without them. It turns out that the air supply system was faulty and they would have died within three weeks. The space program will be cancelled if the president were to find out about this failure. The program leader comes up with a plan to fake the Mars landing. He’s built a spaceship and a faux Mars to show NASA when they send image feedback. All three men refuse to do it. The program leader tells them to reconsider or he’ll be forced to kill their families. Everything is going well and no one suspects anything…except a man named Elliot Whittier (Robert Walden). He works at NASA and runs a personal check to make sure that video signal is working fine. He finds that the numbers are wrong. It says that the signal is coming from 300 miles away. He mentions it to his boss who says they’ll check it out later. Suddenly Elliot disappears without a trace. When the ship is returning back to earth, it burns up in the atmosphere and the astronauts are pronounced dead. The three men figure their real deaths are to follow soon and try to escape into the desert. With men in black on their tails, their only hope is a flaky reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliot Gould) and a hidden message in one of the video feeds. Will they live or be wiped from existence totally?
When someone cuts your brakes, it causes your car to speed up to top speed.
It’s faster to roll somewhere than to walk.
There’s no need to check if you’ve killed someone. Just shoot at them a few times and peel out.
Heat makes people tell jokes in a crazy manner.
Mars looks suspiciously like Arizona.
"We are dead. Shit. I was such a good guy." ~Brubaker when he finds out the shuttle burned up in the atmosphere.
Their half-assed attempts at trying to kill Caulfield.
Wow. Well…this wasn’t the movie I expected at all. I thought it was going to be much…cooler. It was kinda lame, actually. The whole movie was spent with all this useless verbal sparring that’s supposed to make the movie sound smart, but it just made it boring. The whole movie is just talking. There’s almost no action. It was also way too long. If they had cut down on the talking a bit, it would’ve been a bit shorter (well duh...). It was weird that the only astronaut who talked was Brubaker. O.J. almost didn’t talk at all. When he did though. Phew. I can see why they didn’t let him get too many lines in. I really, really wanted him to say, “Jive turkey”…just once! That would’ve made this movie go up one whole rating, just for that. Wouldn’t that have been awesome?
Brubaker: We are dead. Shit. I was such a good guy. We better escape before we’re really dead!
Other Guy: Right!
O.J.: Jive turkey. Jive.
Haha. Anyway. The half-assed attempts on Caulfield’s life were pathetic. In the end, if it weren’t for this guy no one would’ve known about the whole conspiracy…so maybe they should’ve tried harder to kill him. Shooting in his general direction and then peeling out doesn’t cut it. Now, cutting his brakes and him careening off a bridge is good. How he survived that it beyond me. When I saw him swimming I was like “how’d he survive that?” Something that was totally hilarious about this movie was how the helicopters would be hovering in the air and they would literally turn to face each other, then face forward and then fly off. Hahah. So lame. The best part of this movie was the final battle scene between the two helicopters and the crop duster…but that’s because it involved no talking and finally some much needed action. This movie had a lot of hype attached to it. This was the movie that made many believe that the moon landing was a conspiracy that never happened. The whole moon landing was staged. This movie didn’t make me think one bit. The Omen made me wonder if that could really have happened. Blair Witch Project made me think that really did happen. Capricorn One made me think that anyone who thinks the moon landing was faked is a jerk who watched this utterly boring movie too many times. Okay, I lied…it made me think…but not in the way I meant. With O.J. Simpson, blatant use of good vs. evil, rattlesnake eating, drug planting, and helicopters vs. crop duster, the jury gives this flick:
(Not Impressed)
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